A little less than 11 light years from our solar system, in the constellation Virgo, lives a red dwarf star called Ross 128. But orbiting this faint solar neighbor is the closest potentially habitable Earth-like planet astronomers have ever detected, called Ross 128 b.

[DIGEST: Washington Post, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Universe Today, The Atlantic] The Internet has been alight with speculation about the existence of alien megastructures since the publication of a paper about the star KIC 8462852 in early September. The star is one of more than 150,000 being monitored by the Kepler Space … Continued